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Of course -- so why does the media work so hard to ignore this fact? Every student learns this in college and yet if you watched media 24/7 -- from Jon Stewart to CNN to Fox -- you would never learn it. Simply put: Race is a social fact without scientific basis. So maybe the Rachel Dolezal thing will kick start the national conversation we need to have. Maybe someone will even state that "Caucasians" do not exist: meaning, there is no group of Americans descended from the Caucasus Mountains in Russia. As Kareem suggests, maybe we should let this woman keep doing social activism and raising her two African-American sons.

Joel Dinerstein is the author of The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (Chicago 2017), American Cool (Prestel 2014), Coach: A Story of NY Cool (Rizzoli 2016), and Swinging the Machine (2003). I am a Professor of English and American Studies at Tulane University and I've taught a course on The History of Cool for 20 years. I hold a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas (Austin) and my research concerns the relationships of popular culture and modernity, race and American music, and literature and ethnicity.

American Cool was an acclaimed exhibit of 100 cool icons and photographs at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery that I co-curated with Frank Goodyear. My first book was an award-winning cultural history of big-band swing and industrialization, Swinging the Machine: Technology, Modernity, and African-American Culture.

I have served as a consultant on popular music for Putumayo Records, HBO's Boardwalk Empire, and the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities). I was the main architect of Tulane's academic website on New Orleans music and culture, Music Rising at Tulane, http://musicrising.tulane.edu.